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In this previous post I described how to discover Netduinos on your network without knowing their IP’s. Building on that, this post describes how to make a Netduino log temperature data, and then how to build a Universal Windows 10 app that displays that data.

With the advent of Internet-of-Things things, you’ll probably need a decent way to actually find all of the things on your network.

Fun fact: If you send a UDP packet to *.255 on your network, your router will then send that along to all the devices on your network. So if your local network is on 192.168.1.x, then send it to 192.168.1.255. Or if you want to send it to everything, then you can send to 255.255.255.255.

In my case, I’ve got this awesome little guy…

…setup with DHCP, so the IP occasionally changes. I’ve got a Windows 10 app that needs to connect to it, so we can use the way above to find the Netduino on the network.

Microsoft’s brand new personal assistant, Cortana, is getting a lot of people excited at the moment. Even though it is in beta, I’ve found it surprisingly good, and already use it for practical reasons daily.

So why not take it a bit further? What about letting her control my lights – because, yes, giving an AI access to deadly electricity is a great idea (no, really, it is).

If you haven’t heard, “the cloud” is kind of a big deal right now. Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s slice of it (with 54% of Fortune 500 companies running on Azure today), and is the reason that when you take a photo on your phone it magically appears on your PC (amongst other things). No one understands the cloud, but we know it is powerful .

At BUILD 2014, Microsoft announced their plan for allowing everything from your teddy bear to your traffic light (because people totally have these) to connect to Azure. And yes, this includes connecting up a full sized traffic light…

My intern and I were asked to do a talk at the Durban University of Technology to the 3rd year IT students to excite them about the possibility of using Netduinos or/and Windows Phones in their final year projects.

We didn’t want to just show them a blinking LED, but rather something that would be relevant to a real-world scenario – so we came up with this:

Sorry for the horrible GIF. What you can probably tell is that it is a time-lapse of the Bitcoin price changing. The graph represents that change, and the LED glows green when it goes up, and red when it goes down. (There is a typo on the screen – USD should be BTC).

The houses in Durban, South Africa (where I live) usually have some form of gap underneath them that ranges from 30cm to big enough to crawl inside. As far as I know it is for ventilation to help with the heat. The problem is that a bunch of squeaky rodents have decided that mine is a good home, and unfortunately the gap is pretty small so I can’t fit. So I decided to make a little car that could go scout out the area and show me what was going on under there, and possibly how to stop it.

So I built a little Bluetooth controlled car using a Netduino and a Windows Phone as a remote.

I make a lot of little gadgets using the Netduino because it is such a good prototyping tool. The SDK and dev tools (Visual Studio) are very mature and usually just work. But mainly, being able to code in C# (including intellisense) is just awesome (the Arduino IDE is rather basic, and I’m not a fan of Wiring). The problem is that these boards start at $35 so it’s not feasible to put them into every little project – plus for most things the Netduino is far more powerful than what you need.

That’s where the ATTiny chips come in. They are a range of tiny little chips that use barely any power, and can control whatever you want them to. Plus, you can burn Arduino onto them to make the coding really easy.